Walmart CEO Issues Wake-Up Call: 'AI Is Going to Change Literally Every Job' (msn.com) 106
It's the world's largest companies by revenue. But Walmart's executives have a blunt message, reports the Wall Street Journal: "Artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs and reshape its workforce."
"It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job," Chief Executive Doug McMillon said this week in one of the most pointed assessments to date from a big-company CEO on AI's likely impact on employment... "Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it."
Inside Walmart, top executives have started to examine AI's implications for its workforce in nearly every high-level planning meeting. Company leaders say they are tracking which job types decrease, increase and stay steady to gauge where additional training and preparation can help workers. "Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side," McMillon said. For now, Walmart executives say the transformation means the size of its global workforce will stay roughly flat even as its revenue climbs. It plans to maintain its head count of around 2.1 million global workers over the next three years, but the mix of those jobs will change significantly, said Donna Morris, Walmart's chief people officer. What the composition will look like remains murky... Already Walmart has built chat bots, which it calls "agents," for customers, suppliers and workers. It is also tracking an expanding share of its supply chain and product trends with AI...
Some changes are already rippling across the workforce. In recent years Walmart has automated many of its warehouses with the help of AI-related technology, triggering some job cuts, executives said. Walmart is also looking to automate some back-of-store tasks. New roles have been established, too. Walmart, for example, created an "agent builder" position last month — an employee who builds AI tools to help merchants. It expects to add people in areas like home delivery or in high-touch customer positions, such as its bakeries. The company has also added more in-store maintenance technicians and truck drivers in recent years.
The article also a comment made by Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley earlier this summer. "Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S."
Inside Walmart, top executives have started to examine AI's implications for its workforce in nearly every high-level planning meeting. Company leaders say they are tracking which job types decrease, increase and stay steady to gauge where additional training and preparation can help workers. "Our goal is to create the opportunity for everybody to make it to the other side," McMillon said. For now, Walmart executives say the transformation means the size of its global workforce will stay roughly flat even as its revenue climbs. It plans to maintain its head count of around 2.1 million global workers over the next three years, but the mix of those jobs will change significantly, said Donna Morris, Walmart's chief people officer. What the composition will look like remains murky... Already Walmart has built chat bots, which it calls "agents," for customers, suppliers and workers. It is also tracking an expanding share of its supply chain and product trends with AI...
Some changes are already rippling across the workforce. In recent years Walmart has automated many of its warehouses with the help of AI-related technology, triggering some job cuts, executives said. Walmart is also looking to automate some back-of-store tasks. New roles have been established, too. Walmart, for example, created an "agent builder" position last month — an employee who builds AI tools to help merchants. It expects to add people in areas like home delivery or in high-touch customer positions, such as its bakeries. The company has also added more in-store maintenance technicians and truck drivers in recent years.
The article also a comment made by Ford Motor Chief Executive Jim Farley earlier this summer. "Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S."
where have all the customers gone (Score:5, Insightful)
Will it eliminate CEO positions? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to me that's the biggest expense in a company.
Re:Will it eliminate CEO positions? (Score:5, Funny)
Also one of the easiest to replace with a machine that hallucinates.
Re:Will it eliminate CEO positions? (Score:4, Interesting)
CEOs are almost always the highest compensated in the company but at a large company like Walmart I guarantee you that the combined cost of all the employees far exceeds that of the employees. Not having a CEO (or not paying him, whatever) wouldn't really change the financial situation of a company.
Now a company where it might actually be the case that the CEO makes way more than all the employees put together is Elon Musk and Tesla's extremely ridiculous compensation package for him. His pay package is actually a large percentage of the company's budget.
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Re:Will it eliminate CEO positions? (Score:5, Informative)
Elmo didn't start Tesla, he was just an early investor (a year later). The only reason he's listed as a 'co-founder' was because it was part of a settlement when he sued them. Tesla would very obviously be better off without him.
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Eh? Perhaps second "employees" was supposed to "executives" or "managers"?
Still not sure if you're right. The executives pay may be based on the gross value of the inventory and sales and thereby strongly disassociated from the employees' pay. I'd want to see the data. Now if you include supplemental payment like food stamps for the poorly paid employees, then it's more likely you're correct.
Only one joke on the story, but it was a pretty good one about replaying the CEO with an AI.
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*sigh*
s/replaying/replacing/
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Re: where have all the customers gone (Score:2, Offtopic)
Where did all the grammar go? Why does it say "it's the largest companies" when obviously they meant company.
Re: where have all the customers gone (Score:5, Interesting)
AI helpers do not understand language, but instead perform statistical word completion (in the literature, this is called "generative modelling").
The idea goes back at least to Claude Shannon's papers on communication theory from the 1950s. This page has a link to his 1948 paper. [wikipedia.org] A particularly illuminating example is on p.7, Section 3.
Your example exhibits short term trigram learning. The completion of 3-word phrases is consistent, but the 4-word completion is obviously wrong.
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The idea goes back at least to Claude Shannon's papers on communication theory from the 1950s. This page has a link to his 1948 paper. [wikipedia.org] A particularly illuminating example is on p.7, Section 3.
Cool find
There won't be headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
What they're trying to do is create a new economic system apart from capitalism where they can control goods and services entirely without needing consumers.
That's why AI is so desirable to them. It lets wealth access skill without skill accessing wealth.
Basically a new form of feudalism.
You would think all the Sci-Fi nerds around here would figure out that's what they're doing but nope. The idea that they might let capitalism die just doesn't cross anyone's mind because capitalism is so fundamental to every aspect of our worldview and upbringing.
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This is an interesting take, can you explain this to me in more detail:
"What they're trying to do is create a new economic system apart from capitalism where they can control goods and services entirely without needing consumers.
That's why AI is so desirable to them. It lets wealth access skill without skill accessing wealth."
Basically they want ot turn America Into (Score:4, Interesting)
Saudi Arabia. A handful of kings and queens, a very tiny number of people serving them and a vast vast sea of extraordinarily poor people kept down by a combination of brutal violence and religion. All of it maintained in perpetuality by technology that didn't exist the last time we threw off the yoke of slavery.
Here is what techno-feudalism is. You have a very small group of what are effectively kings and queens that own everything and they don't care that they're aren't markets for them to sell products to because they own everything. They see the writing on the walls with demographic changes making them substantially less powerful and wealthy and they're not willing to give any of it up. Fabulous wealth is not enough for them they want to live like the kings of old. Techno-feudalism.
That's the other problem techno-feudalism is something I don't think a lot of people can seem to understand. When I point out that the king doesn't need you to buy his iPhones folks just cannot comprehend what that means. They can't comprehend the idea of someone who doesn't need money in any way shape or form because they are above money. They can't comprehend a civilization that transcends money without transcending poverty. That's techno-feudalism and that's the direction guys like Jeff bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon musk want us to go. They want to be God Kings.
That's techno-feudalism and that's the direction guys like Jeff bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Elon musk want us to go. They want to be God Kings.
At the rate we are going we are going to be a kleptocracy long before climate change breaks down our civilization. Techno feudalism. We already have a fundamental breakdown in capitalism going on right now. All regulation necessary for capitalism to be functional is being stripped away. The networks of free trade required for the system to function are also being broken down so that the oligarchs can build little fiefdoms where they control everything absolutely.
So no you're not going to get AI focused on solving the problems in your life. Because our entire system is built not to solve the problems in your life but to enrich a tiny minority that we all worship like the divine kings of old. A return to feudalism. What the cool kids call techno feudalism.
They want it for game ranches and golf courses. We need to put our boots firmly in the ground and take a stand now or they're going to cut us the pieces in the coming years. We won't even get what the peasants had back in the day. What we're looking at is called techno-feudalism.
To meet the basic demand of your civilization is a shortage. Looking at the very basic demands of civilization not being met and saying that's okay because shrug that's capitalism shrug is what we call end stage capitalism or techno feudalism. That's all well and good but I do so wish you wouldn't talk about it as if it's a) inevitable and b) not something that's going to affect you.
In our current system only owners of the capital get the benefits of the automation. This means that yes, only rich people will have access to technology. In other words techno feudalism.
The Luddites were real people with real problems. Yeah in 100 years there would be new jobs for those loom workers but that didn't help anyone alive at the time. And it's not going to help you if you live long enough to see techno feudalism. We can't get rid of cars because the benefit our elites, aka the ruling class. But they're starting to move to a new model, techno feudalism, where they don't need us anymore.
But I am saying that there is a significant class of billionaires trying to make techno feudalism a reality. It's important to talk about it whenever the opportunity arises because it's not something most people believe is real.
As for the end game: techno-feudalism. Imagine if you had the Star Trek no money world but it was a dystopia instead. That's what Gates & Bezos (and the ones you probably like too, like Elon) are after.
There is no such thing as capitalism. Not the one you idolize. The system always break down into neo-feudalism as wealth accumulates at the top. It's inevitable. The kind of competition you dream of is just that, a dream. You're a man now, it's time to put away childish toys you played with during your 4 to 14 boyhood.
I don't see an the end to it. With the gay panic because gay people are about 7% of the population you could do a bit of exposure on TV and that got people used to them and sooner or later everyone met one in real life.
Trans people are less than 1/10 that. This means that it's easy to go your entire life without ever knowing one. And trans women, which is where all the panic is, or half of that so you're looking at more like 1/20th. That makes the usual tactic for dealing with bigotry, exposure therapy, untenable.
It took 10 years but Americans are absolutely terrified of trans people. 10 years of non-stop propaganda did that. A few research poll showed Americans think 20% of the country is trans. That's 40 times the actual number. And realistically again they're only thinking of trans women so it's more like 80 times the actual number.
I don't know what you do with that level of hysteria. Especially when it's continuously fed by billionaire propaganda
--
www.fark.com/politics
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Re:There won't be headlines (Score:5, Informative)
There's a book that might be interesting
Technofeudalism by Yanis Varoufakis [penguin.co.uk].
He has made one of the most clear statements of the idea of the destruction of capitalism by the new tech barons. In his statement it's about a change from purchases to rent seeking which gives the owners of particular tech dominions much greater power over transactions than they would have in a normal capitalist exchange.
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They aren't going to be seeking rent because you seek rent when you need income from other people.
The ultra wealthy want to have machines basically doing everything for them with only a handful of engineers to keep the machines working and a handful of thugs to keep the engineers in line.
Basically think about a planet with a few billion people and only about 100,000 of them have a decent life. The rest l
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I think you are misunderstanding. Money for them isn't a way to have something. It's a way to take something from other people. If everything was automated for the ultra-rich and the others didn't matter, then the others could just go on with their lives and be fine. They wouldn't live in squalor.
Now, how do you ensure that they live in squalor. "From them that have not shall be taken even that which they have"? Answer, whatever they have, you ensure that they give you a percentage of it. If you prefer the
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Re:There won't be headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Built chatbots.
2) Automated some warehouse tasks (and pretended that was AI)
3) Hired people to improve the chatbots because they don't work well (a position they call "agent builder")
The other things they mention are just future guesses (they talk about it a lot at executive meetings). They also mention revenue is going up (why not advertise your company at any opportunity) and interestingly hired more truck drivers. So much for self-driving trucks.
tl;dr it's important to distinguish what AI is currently doing in the present and what people are predicting for the future.
Short-term the goal is 30% permanent unemployment (Score:2)
Long-term the goal is to automate basically every aspect of production.
Also It's important to minimize the number of engineers because highly skilled engineers are smart and they can be a threat to you so you want as few of those as possible.
This lets you reduce t
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*waves to his "good buddy"... good ol' Trump-is-to-blame-for-everything*
Last I looked, Trump didn't kill millions of Jews or start World Wars (unless I missed a headline somewhere).
As far as reducing the number of engineers, I can see them doing something like this: the engineer has access to the current code, he can change the code to fix a few little things, he has to send it to the manager who sends it up the chain for final approval before some senior technician uploads it to the system that's actually
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Long-term the goal is to automate basically every aspect of production.
tbh I'm ok with that. I want all work automated away.
The main thing to worry about (as you point out) is that it doesn't become a dictatorship. No doubt there will be some pain along the way, but I'm optimistic that it will end well. (It's important to distinguish between current ability and future predictions because future predictions are often propaganda by CEOs.)
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You would think all the Sci-Fi nerds around here would figure out that's what they're doing but nope.
Absolutely wrong. Most have figured it out, but few are willing to speak of it openly as one of the features of this type of government is to silence those who speak with life ending penalties.
I am hard-wired to say "Fuck you" to authoritarians. I literally can't help it. I would die to say "fuck you". That is why you hear me speaking of it. Smart people keep their mouth shut.
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If this is the case, with effectively all workers effected negatively through job loss or job deterioration, then almost all of humanity will reject AI powered organizations and services.
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So... basically, we reject every single thing.
We'll all go Survivorman style while there are still forests (until the AI sends the robots to clear-cut the forests and build more datacenters for it)... until we kill all the wild animals and then turn on each other in the woods and go all Donner Party.
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Indeed. But that idea requires connection two closely related facts by a simple chain of reasoning. The "CEO" subspecies of the human race is generally not capable of doing that. (Affects many others too.)
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Customers? We fired.them too. They kept demanding these pesky "goods and services" in exchange for cash..Our AI predicted we won't need them. Instead we do this other thing AI told us to...
A list of jobs that will not be affected by it: (Score:5, Interesting)
AI will not change cooks. I have seen AI recipes, not helpful.
Which brings us to:
Waiters, Janitors, Masons, Electricians, Carpenters, Sommeliers, Wielders, Cashiers, and Farmers.
Re:A list of jobs that will not be affected by it: (Score:5, Interesting)
"It's very clear that AI is going to change literally every job," Chief Executive Doug McMillon said this week in one of the most pointed assessments to date from a big-company CEO on AI's likely impact on employment... "Maybe there's a job in the world that AI won't change, but I haven't thought of it."
How about Walmart Greeter?
More seriously... while his statement might sound profound at first, it's merely stating the obvious. Technology and the Internet have already been dramatically changing "literally every job" for the past half century.
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How about Walmart Greeter?
When the shoppers are all AI bots, I'm sure they'll prefer being greeted by their own kind.
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Re: A list of jobs that will not be affected by it (Score:2)
Walmart customer host (Score:3)
Over time, the Walmart greeter's responsibilities expanded to what is now the "customer host" position. Because some of these new responsibilities were somewhat physical, some associates with disabilities were moved to self checkout host or other front-end positions.
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AI will not change cooks. I have seen AI recipes, not helpful.
Which brings us to:
Waiters, Janitors, Masons, Electricians, Carpenters, Sommeliers, Wielders, Cashiers, and Farmers.
You're definitely not thinking abstract enough. Several of those have already been changed by AI.
You said AI will not change cooks yet you acknowledge that AI recipes exist. We've done this as an experiment one day, and ChatGPT prepared instructions for a perfectly reasonable hoisin Chicken and didn't even suggest using glue or bleach for anything. The internet is full of bad recipes, and AI can already provide something better. There are already "AI powered" kitchen appliances on the market, there are alre
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I defined nothing to be AI that wasn't AI. AI is an all encompassing word for results based on a system trained through some form of machine learning algorithm. What we call "AI" is involved, even if the final model run isn't contributing to the learning.
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(Love the Illuminatus quote!)
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Let's rapid fire the rest:
That's the plan, all right.
Re:A list of jobs that will not be affected by it: (Score:5, Insightful)
For carpenters and welders, you cite robotics and AI powered tooling in workshops; ignoring the vast bulk of those two trades which is done ‘in the field’ ie, construction of houses, pipeline and structural welding.
The other examples, you mainly cite ‘planning and optimization’ which is essentially ‘middle management’. The actual day to day work of janitors, farmers, electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, road building crews, hair dressers, dog walkers, grocery stockers, and countless other jobs remain strictly in the realm of fully human.
And most of those workers would barely notice if AI replaced the middle manager above them. Many already get their assignments and tasks delivered to them by email or app on a tablet.
And speaking as someone who is in the agriculture industry, you are vesting to much credit in how far modern tech has pushed into the industry. While the ‘ai’ tools you described technically *exist*, adoption is *far* from wide spread. Most of the farmers I know still think the GPS steering in tractors is new fangled enough.
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They are nothing of the sort. The premise was that AI will change jobs, they absolutely will. In much the same way getting a 32" monitor changed my job compared to the 24" I had before.
It's pointless goalpost moving, if you as a janitor need to adopt digital tools to interface with middle management, then your job has changed.
Those guys building houses? Well Makita's latest pro range of drills include torque sensors which run an algorithm based on AI that attempt to estimate the perfect way to sink a screw.
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So, they weatherize a robot, send it into the field with a welder on it's back so it can weld the pipelines... what stops a robot from pushing a board through a tablesaw?
Janitors: a robot with machine vision that mops a floor and cleans windows
Farmers: self-driving machinery that does the entire process, complete with everything being engineered enough for faster and bigger yields, factory farms for eggs, machines that tend the cows and pigs
Bricklayer: 3D printed buildings or a dozen robots that plop bricks
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You have listed ways that, if someone DESIRED to use AI in their job, they could. And things like a cash register that uses AI will not affect the job of the CASHIER, while it might affect the people that build the cash register.
You have not listed ways that will change the job itself. Those job does not need the AI. AI is being applied to it in the manner that a sports logo is added to a T-shirt, rather than a coating to the cloth.
The people that do those jobs can continue to do them in the same manne
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if someone DESIRED to use AI in their job, they could
AI is a tool. Tools can be ignored, or in some cases forced upon you.
And things like a cash register that uses AI will not affect the job of the CASHIER
You latched on to the single dumbest example there bud. AI has already replaced cashiers wholesale in some stores. I.e. there are stores you can go to without any cashiers. None.
But even if we ignore your silly misstep, it's a distinction without a difference. If I as a cashier use a machine where I have to type in dollars, or if the cash register manufacturer includes a barcode scanner, or if the cash register manufacturer uses an AI came
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Delusional execs (Score:5, Insightful)
i haven't seen this level of global delusion in my entire life. the executives of every company are absolutely insane. they're blinded by the promise of a jump in efficiency, but dont know enough about the underlying technology to really understand how it can be applied, so they're all just blindly walking off a cliff.
this is insane to see and very illuminating about how stupid all of these PHB's are.
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"LLMs" are a red herring. Physics will always win.
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Yep, the money spent, the electricity consumed and shear amount of unreliable behaviour should be telling them to stop the insanity.
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LLM tech/AI doesn't have to be better than all of us to be catastrophically disruptive, it just has to to be better than the bottom 25-30%.
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It don't even compare. Humans easily outperform LLMs at programming right now ... and that's touted as a stronghold of LLMs! A LLM can't do anything correctly without someone skilled at the keyboard constantly refining the prompt to what may as well be another programming language.
At best it's a weird tool that you have to fight with all the time.
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At best it's a weird tool that you have to fight with all the time.
You're using it wrong.
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Its like they all got out of the same hypnotoad timeshare presentation
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Alternatively, they see an opportunity to fire people and renegotiate contracts with lower payment. There have already been several instances of people being fired because they were being made redundant by AI and then it turned out H1B visas were used to hire much cheaper replacements. Given that was done immediately, the bosses knew exactly what they were doing from the start.
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Lemmings.
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Well, I am not sure, but the level of collective delusion and hype-adoration (for lack of a better term) is really astounding. It is like these people have zero actual understanding of reality.
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It depends on how much the job changes. Technically the introduction of bigger computer monitors changed my job as well. Someone further up rattled off a list of jobs they said were safe from AI and yet literally every one has products or services that they use in their professional already on the market with AI powered features, or in some cases used AI long before AI was cool (machine learning based systems have existed for decades).
For a given definition of "change" he is right. Heck for a given definiti
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I've seen this level of global delusion before, it was called Y2K. It had people escaping the coming calamity by living in the wilderness and building underground bunkers. This new terror seems to have a lot in common with that old one.
self check out really went bad for them (Score:2)
self check out really went bad for them
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No, that was because of malicious customers.
So that +400 million bonus was absolutely justified.
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Observation (Score:4, Insightful)
This person runs a shop not an AI company, I am not sure he understands tech that well.
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I'm not sure he understands his own shop that well. But I'll bet it understands him.
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Managers in general don't understand the situation (Score:2)
That is my personal observation
Bagholders needed (Score:2)
"Everyone else will be affected but me" (Score:3)
Consequences for thee, but not for me.
What about the Hallucination Problem? (Score:2)
When you or I use one of the AI chatboxes we see errors a significant fraction of the time. And of course this is only a small fraction of the errors because of our lack of previous knowledge.
I just don't understand why business is going to use AI so heavily with all these errors.
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It's not hallucinations (those only happen for biological organisms). These are errors in pattern prediction -- malfunctions. The malfunction rate in these things is astounding. Imagine a surgeon who gets more business every time he kills a patient because he saw "he" and assumed he was supposed to operate on the head instead of the heart. That's where LLM's are.
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It is not a malfunction. The LLM is working perfectly fine and perfectly correctly when it produces hallucinations. Hence the term "hallucination".
It is only a "malfunction" if you mistakenly believe LLMs are capable of reliably giving correct answers. They are not. The mathematics they are based on does not allow that.
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When you or I use one of the AI chatboxes we see errors a significant fraction of the time. And of course this is only a small fraction of the errors because of our lack of previous knowledge.
I just don't understand why business is going to use AI so heavily with all these errors.
That is simple: They will, things will fail, they will refuse to acknowledge reality and continue. Some months/years later Gartner (or somebody else "credible") will make a study titled "AI decreases productivity due to bad answers - relying on it is stupid", and then they will roll it all back. Those that survive having made these utterly idiotic decisions, that is.
Oh, and for decisions within regulatory oversight, using AI will likely be outlawed.
What we witness here is how incapable the typical CEO actua
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Because it's cheaper because you don't pay 5 cashiers $13 an hour or whatever each... you pay one college graduate $13 an hour to debug ten registers, and that's the bottom line!
With ICE... (Score:2)
With ICE arresting, detaining, and deporting below minimum-wage workers Walmart hires through contractors, yeah they will need AI. With drones floating around following us...like in Futurama:
https://youtu.be/Jass7lf8oxQ?t... [youtu.be] (the new loss prevention...)
What will be funny is when the AI replaces the ROI cost-effective focused human CEO with a more efficient program, that doesn't get performance bonuses, works 24x7.
Think of the "BOSS" from Doctor Who "The Green Death"...or any other thriller-horror sci-fi B
Made me appreciate people more, at least (Score:2)
1. I am now BEGGING to get into chats with actual humans because the AI agents suck SO HARD
2. I interviewed with a company and asked about their AI policy and the policy is: we don't use it for any of our code. The guy said that if it were up to him, he MIGHT allow it a bit, but only at the senior level and above. Otherwise, you have to do your time and learn your lessons. I respect this.
3. I'm surprised at how well people actually DO recognize AI slop and resent it.
So yeah, it's changed my opinion about jo
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Re: Made me appreciate people more, at least (Score:2)
I guess that's the greatest expert on that matter (Score:2)
Including yours (Score:2)
See above,
Another one bites the dust (Score:2)
It is fascinating how these CEOs all commit career suicide just for a mindless hype.
If AI takes our jobs, how do compnaies profit? (Score:2)
Again? (Score:3)
Yeah, and you'll have to hire them back for $$$ (Score:2)
I've worked with Ford, and I totally know where they want to cut IT workers to save money, but AI will totally fail them in a couple of areas. How do I know that? I worked with Ford and GM and now work with Boeing and I know where AI totally fails in the "upgrade" (really data migration) process. Yeah, teachable, still fails to understand the bad programmer lingo in the instructions (I know what "blah" means, AI would hard fail). That said, we are automating the hell out of the process, people will probably
Conversations on UBI (Score:3)
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That is a very huge *if*.
Yes, AI will probably affect every job.
But, a significant line from the article that was not quoted in the summary:
Some jobs and tasks at the retail juggernaut will be eliminated, while others will be created, McMillon said
The end of the world is not here just yet.
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All those factory jobs that have been lost? Guess what, nobody wants them.
All those farm jobs that have been lost to automation? Nobody wants those either.
Automation always takes the jobs nobody wants. That's a good thing.
Your estimation of what AI will be able to do, is way, way too optimistic.
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I'd take one of those factory jobs, or one of the farm jobs (if I can find a ride).
You're looking at the LLM-AI as it stands today... equip the AB robot arm with computer vision and OCR, and it can dispense medications at the pharmacy... make the farmer's equipment self-driving and you don't need farmers... have a robot flipping burgers at McD's... might take a few years, and then we'll have The Animatrix episode 'The Second Renaissance'.
Meanwhile, those of us who don't have those degrees and unrealistic ye
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(BTW... which is the best setting for Comment Post Mode?)
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If AI really is going to be as disruptive as some people are predicting, you'd hope that governments would be having conversations about what the hell is coming.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of government in the West. Such is the price of listening to propaganda. Don't feel bad, this misunderstanding is constantly pushed as a narrative.
Happy Path (Score:2)
AI would do great following Happy Path for IT. Non-Happy Path with no workaround documentation, ouch, fail. Going by real world experience, We had an engineer figure out a workaround and the AI failed hard. Probably 3-6 months of downtime and $500 million+ dollars of fail, so yeah... There is now a documented fix and bugfixed installer, after we reported it, but it took 6 months.
what he actually means (Score:2)
what he actually means is "AI will interfere with every job"
Re: (Score:2)
All the things he is talking about is essentially trying to use AI to replace the most irritating employee in any industry: Middle Managers.
They don’t do anything but interpret what the actual manager says, with an added layer of complexity and personal vendettas.
AI != automation (Score:2)
A couple hundred neuron MLP in an otherwise completely human programmed control loop and state machine is not AI and that's 99% of existing automation in warehouses. Those warehouse bots are not using huge stateful neural networks trained with reinforcement learning.
Automation might go a little faster now, but that has more to do with human sentiment than AI.
I'm still of the opinion that most tasks where AI can help are AI hard. With some obvious exceptions where iteration and failing forward are the standa
Re: (Score:2)
(I had to look it up... MLP = Multi-Layer Perception... at first glance, I thought you meant My Little Ponies)
Nothing new here (Score:2)
The Internet has changed literally every job and somehow things haven't changed that much, have they?
A quote NOT found in the summary (Score:2)
Some jobs and tasks at the retail juggernaut will be eliminated, while others will be created, McMillon said
People keep glossing over this truth. Every new technology ever, has eliminated some jobs, and created other new ones. There is no reason to suppose that this time will be different.
Indeed... (Score:3)
I bet the CEO is fun at parties (Score:1)
you are right sir, if you have not thought of it, it does not exist \ end sarcasm
Growth and Too Big to Care and One Other Thing. (Score:1)