How the Internet Rewired Work - and What That Tells Us About AI's Likely Impact (msn.com) 105
"The internet did transform work — but not the way 1998 thought..." argues the Wall Street Journal. "The internet slipped inside almost every job and rewired how work got done."
So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs "are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work," and instead the internet brought "the quiet transformation of nearly every job in the economy... Today, just 10% of workers make minimal use of the internet on the job — roles like butcher and carpet installer." [T]he bigger story has been additive. In 1998, few could conceive of social media — let alone 65,000 social-media managers — and 200,000 information-security analysts would have sounded absurd when data still lived on floppy disks... Marketing shifted from campaign bursts to always-on funnels and A/B testing. Clinics embedded e-prescribing and patient portals, reshaping front-office and clinical handoffs. The steps, owners and metrics shifted. Only then did the backbone scale: We went from server closets wedged next to the mop sink to data centers and cloud regions, from lone system administrators to fulfillment networks, cybersecurity and compliance.
That is where many unexpected jobs appeared. Networked machines and web-enabled software quietly transformed back offices as much as our on-screen lives. Similarly, as e-commerce took off, internet-enabled logistics rewired planning roles — logisticians, transportation and distribution managers — and unlocked a surge in last-mile work. The build-out didn't just hire coders; it hired coordinators, pickers, packers and drivers. It spawned hundreds of thousands of warehouse and delivery jobs — the largest pockets of internet-driven job growth, and yet few had them on their 1998 bingo card... Today, the share of workers in professional and managerial occupations has more than doubled since the dawn of the digital era.
So what does that tell us about AI? Our mental model often defaults to an industrial image — John Henry versus the steam drill — where jobs are one dominant task, and automation maps one-to-one: Automate the task, eliminate the job. The internet revealed a different reality: Modern roles are bundles. Technologies typically hit routine tasks first, then workflows, and only later reshape jobs, with second-order hiring around the backbone. That complexity is what made disruption slower and more subtle than anyone predicted. AI fits that pattern more than it breaks it... [LLMs] can draft briefs, summarize medical notes and answer queries. Those are tasks — important ones — but still parts of larger roles. They don't manage risk, hold accountability, reassure anxious clients or integrate messy context across teams. Expect a rebalanced division of labor: The technical layer gets faster and cheaper; the human layer shifts toward supervision, coordination, complex judgment, relationship work and exception handling.
What to expect from AI, then, is messy, uneven reshuffling in stages. Some roles will contract sharply — and those contractions will affect real people. But many occupations will be rewired in quieter ways. Productivity gains will unlock new demand and create work that didn't exist, alongside a build-out around data, safety, compliance and infrastructure.
AI is unprecedented; so was the internet. The real risk is timing: overestimating job losses, underestimating the long, quiet rewiring already under way, and overlooking the jobs created in the backbone. That was the internet's lesson. It's likely to be AI's as well.
So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs "are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work," and instead the internet brought "the quiet transformation of nearly every job in the economy... Today, just 10% of workers make minimal use of the internet on the job — roles like butcher and carpet installer." [T]he bigger story has been additive. In 1998, few could conceive of social media — let alone 65,000 social-media managers — and 200,000 information-security analysts would have sounded absurd when data still lived on floppy disks... Marketing shifted from campaign bursts to always-on funnels and A/B testing. Clinics embedded e-prescribing and patient portals, reshaping front-office and clinical handoffs. The steps, owners and metrics shifted. Only then did the backbone scale: We went from server closets wedged next to the mop sink to data centers and cloud regions, from lone system administrators to fulfillment networks, cybersecurity and compliance.
That is where many unexpected jobs appeared. Networked machines and web-enabled software quietly transformed back offices as much as our on-screen lives. Similarly, as e-commerce took off, internet-enabled logistics rewired planning roles — logisticians, transportation and distribution managers — and unlocked a surge in last-mile work. The build-out didn't just hire coders; it hired coordinators, pickers, packers and drivers. It spawned hundreds of thousands of warehouse and delivery jobs — the largest pockets of internet-driven job growth, and yet few had them on their 1998 bingo card... Today, the share of workers in professional and managerial occupations has more than doubled since the dawn of the digital era.
So what does that tell us about AI? Our mental model often defaults to an industrial image — John Henry versus the steam drill — where jobs are one dominant task, and automation maps one-to-one: Automate the task, eliminate the job. The internet revealed a different reality: Modern roles are bundles. Technologies typically hit routine tasks first, then workflows, and only later reshape jobs, with second-order hiring around the backbone. That complexity is what made disruption slower and more subtle than anyone predicted. AI fits that pattern more than it breaks it... [LLMs] can draft briefs, summarize medical notes and answer queries. Those are tasks — important ones — but still parts of larger roles. They don't manage risk, hold accountability, reassure anxious clients or integrate messy context across teams. Expect a rebalanced division of labor: The technical layer gets faster and cheaper; the human layer shifts toward supervision, coordination, complex judgment, relationship work and exception handling.
What to expect from AI, then, is messy, uneven reshuffling in stages. Some roles will contract sharply — and those contractions will affect real people. But many occupations will be rewired in quieter ways. Productivity gains will unlock new demand and create work that didn't exist, alongside a build-out around data, safety, compliance and infrastructure.
AI is unprecedented; so was the internet. The real risk is timing: overestimating job losses, underestimating the long, quiet rewiring already under way, and overlooking the jobs created in the backbone. That was the internet's lesson. It's likely to be AI's as well.
was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibberish? (Score:5, Insightful)
I realize that the Wall Street Journal has gone downhill but, seriously. I'd ask why it got reposted here but, slashdot hasn't gone downhill so much as it hasn't ever had much height above sea level.
Re: was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibber (Score:1)
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Most jobs in a bureaucracy are useless and not productive.
That was DOGE's mantra. Didn't seem to work out like planned.
Re: was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibber (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed.
And the entire context of the article is incorrect, along with the concept that AI is revolutionary somehow. It's only the latest iteration of mechanization advocacy through software.
No doubt certain models can ally efforts towards quality and productivity results, but these are often highly monolithic and silos, rather than your brilliant new friend. The marketing folks, however, prefer you think of AI as unerring, useful, and safe to use. It is not.
The posted article gets almost everything wrong. What's important here is that people with apparently brilliant minds are being fooled so thoroughly, thinking that they've invented a new and interesting observation, when both the premise is wrong, as is the conclusion.
But this is a Murdoch publication, and must be discounted for inherent lack of objectivity resident in all Murdoch publications. They are uniformly hype and porn (of one kind and another).
Re: was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibbe (Score:1)
"the concept that AI is revolutionary somehow."
In a context-sensitive universe, how come all the tools engineers came up with before the attention mechanism could not do context-sensitivity?
Re: was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibber (Score:5, Informative)
That's only true when jobs got replaced. The typing pool was an important part of business exchange because chickenscratch was hard to read. Schools had stopped teaching handwriting as a course - I said handwriting and nut cursive, because schools used to force you to be able to write legibly as a matter of course. If you had poor motor control you got stuck writing hours and hours of lines until it was pretty enough. Typewriters eliminated the need for people to be extremely neat and freed up education time from rote writing of letters to higher levels of instruction.
And it was the days where bad handwriting would get the back of your hand caned.
So the typing pool was necessary - you could get a letter drafted and typed out neatly and send it off to a client who would get this nice looking letter rather than a handwritten hard to decipher note. At the same time, the typing pool wrote up all the documentation for the project - you might share handwritten notes amongst the team, but you'd send your information out through the typing pool.
Once computers started becoming common, the need for the typing pool lessened and by the 90s was basically gone and everyone was expected to have basic skills.
Sure there are people doing useless jobs, but they're generally only one and two in oddball areas. There's no typing pool anymore because that was many people and as the need for them lessened, so did their numbers. Likewise, any engineering firm would have a calculator room where you'd send your calculations to be done by people with adding machines, and they almost went away with the advent of electronic calculators and computers. (NASA kept them around until the 1990s or so when Johnson retired because astronauts would ask her to confirm the computer's calculations).
The "useless" people you mention are generally the leftovers because someone somewhere still didn't want to do things themselves. They don't really accumulate.
What you are thinking of might be useless processes. You know, where you have to go through a whole requisitions process just to get a stapler where just getting the approvals often cost several times more than the item itself. That exists in a lot of places, and is what you are thinking of, because it's forcing people to be kept around who do nothing but manage the process.
But as DOGE showed, you can't just cut the people - because if the process needs to be done, you've just eliminated the people who are managing it and now the pipeline backs up. It only works if you cut the process first, then eliminate the people.
Alas, some process is necessary - often instituted as a CYA. Your boss asking you to do something illegal, and you asking them for it by email is a process so you have documentation. But it's a process, and that's how it all starts. Government is full of process because often it's to ensure fairness - you didn't exclude supplier X because you've have a beef with who runs the company - you excluded supplier X because product Y they offered didn't meet your specification Z. So when supplier X sues you (and they always do), you have a piece of paper that clearly shows that was the case. If they pursue the matter, you can ask them about why specification Z was not met by the product and why it's in the specification at all because the process is so well documented.
Think of when NASA awards SpaceX the next contract. ULA will likely tie up NASA and SpaceX in a lawsuit so convoluted because DOGE cut the people who would be able to demonstrate why SpaceX was the right choice and the documentation backing that up. And in the end, NASA, SpaceX and ULA would've spent billions on lawyers and dozens of years because DOGE saved $1M on personnel they thought was "unnecessary".
Re:was that w,ritten by AI, or is it human gibberi (Score:5, Insightful)
It was written by people who don't understand that the quoted butcher and carpet installer contribute more to society than most of the internet-tranformed jobs. Or the people who wrote the article, for that matter.
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It's clearly a biased example intended to make the white collar readers of the WSJ feel good.
In reality, another example of a non-internet job is NBA professional basketball player. Those guys make plenty of money, Internet is NOT required.
But then again, listing those examples would make some of the white collars question their life choices...
Trades are barely affected (Score:4, Interesting)
Cellphones definitely had an impact but Internet not so much. We've swapped yellow pages for a search engine. Big whoopee.
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:1)
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:4, Informative)
Yellow pages were better than the internet, because (a) they were encyclopedic, (b) they couldn't really be gamed, and (c) it was actually easier to find businesses that way than go through all sorts of garbage returned by search engines.
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:5, Interesting)
I hired a plumber a few years back to change out some valves and pipes that he could do with the stock out of his truck in 90 minutes that would have taken me two days of home depot runs.
After the job, he took out his tablet, typed in all the parts he used, logged his time, and had me tap my credit card. I get an email receipt, he gets paid for the job his apprentice gets his hours logged, and neither he, his boss, nor I have to think about it anymore.
This is in contrast to the guy who blows out my sprinklers for the winter. He comes with the big compressor. Does his thing for 15 minutes and leaves. Then a week later I get a bill in the mail and am expected to mail a paper check.
Trades are as affected as they want to be.
About 10 or 15 years ago, one of my employer's suppliers of electrical and hvac stuff was still an old timer who sent around paper catalogs and did ordering by phone.
Don't know if he's still around but I'm pretty sure he or whoever is running his outfit isn't doing it that way anymore and I'm also sure that the sprinkler guy isn't going to be doing it that way for my longer either.
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Credit cards predate even cellphones. Having handheld devices for job management also predates the Internet. As you say, they add tech as they choose.
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:1)
Yeah I remember the convenience of my dad handing over his credit card in the early 90s and having the clerk run it through those embosser/carbon paper things.
And I'm sure everyone over 50 who used to have a summer job at the amusement park remembers the fun of dealing with all those paper slips and only actually getting paid after the physical paperwork got reconciled.
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Good luck finding a Plumber, Electrician, or even a Gardener who will take a credit card these days. A lot of them won't because they don't want to eat the card transaction fee. If they do take cards, they adjust their pricing to cover the transaction fee. I've had to use paper checks to pay tradesmen for a few years now. I won't use Venmo.
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I'm unaware of any other sort. Paper checks are considered fraudulent by the trades I have access to, in Arizona, and not without good cause.
Your locale is not at all like mine.
Re: Trades are barely affected (Score:5, Interesting)
Trades are as affected as they want to be.
About 10 or 15 years ago, one of my employer's suppliers of electrical and hvac stuff was still an old timer who sent around paper catalogs and did ordering by phone.
Jaycar (a bit like Radio Shack) in .au tried to get rid of their paper catalog: https://www.jaycar.com.au/ [jaycar.com.au]
Initially, the store staff said "use our website to find stuff." Their website sucks in general, and search in particular. If you're searching for an audio cable, it might be listed under "cable," but "cable" might not be in the description at all. Maybe it's saved as a "lead" or "wire." the point is, the user has no way of knowing unless they already know.
After about 6 months I was in the store again, asking for something like a DE9 connector. So, probably not something they sell every day, but not something wildly obscure either. The first thing the staff member did was bring out the tatty dog-eared copy of their last catalog. He didn't even try to use the company website. I commented on this and it was clear that many, many customers had said the same thing. (and asked for a real catalog!)
Finally, after a couple of years, the policy was reversed. You can now get a decent Jaycar catalog again. It's not perfect but it's better than their shitty website. You can draw on it. You can write stuff in the margins. You can open it up in the store and point to a product and say "I want this one."
The catalog is on their website at https://www.jaycar.com.au/annu... [jaycar.com.au] but I happily paid the 6AUD for one because it makes my own job easier.
I'm not necessarily saying "old-school paper is better," merely pointing out that the converse isn't always true either. It's a huge expense to produce a paper catalog, just like publishing any other work of non-fiction. But a business can't eliminate this expense by having some minimum-wage idiot shit out a half-baked website then claiming the website is somehow superior.
PS. Jaycar was lucky in this case because they don't have much major competition in the market, therefore they had the time to fix their mistake before going out of business. The story of how their main competitor, Dick Smith Electronics, shot themselves in the foot in the early 2000s is a rant for another time...
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PS. Jaycar was lucky in this case because they don't have much major competition in the market, therefore they had the time to fix their mistake before going out of business.
I'd say they still haven't fixed their mistake, which was to create a shitty web site. A good web catalog will be far superior to any paper catalog, providing multiple ways to find a part, having real-time information about where the part is located among the retail stores, warehouses and suppliers, providing links to datasheets, installation guides, and lots more.
If Jaycar gets a competitor that builds a good web site, they'll go out of business. The fact that they don't have much competition has saved
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I'd say they still haven't fixed their mistake, which was to create a shitty web site. A good web catalog will be far superior to any paper catalog, providing multiple ways to find a part, having real-time information about where the part is located among the retail stores, warehouses and suppliers, providing links to datasheets, installation guides, and lots more.
If Jaycar gets a competitor that builds a good web site, they'll go out of business. The fact that they don't have much competition has saved them so far, but they've responded by going the wrong direction.
Ideally, they'd have both. But you're right, their website still sucks. Digikey has a great parametric search but that probably wouldn't work for a product line like Jaycar's. I'd settle for a decent wildcard search, so I could at least do some AND/OR/NOT stuff on the search results.
As for competition, I used their competitor, Altronics for a while because Altronics always used a proper catalog (and they don't spam me with SMS, but that's another story). If Altronics had more retail stores on my side of the
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I've yet to find a "web catalog" that's easier to use than a paper catalog. Better yet would be a .pdf of the paper catalog linked on the company web site.
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I've yet to find a "web catalog" that's easier to use than a paper catalog.
I think you're fooling yourself. Confirmation bias at work.
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I was in the HVAC/Plumbing design business for 43 years. Paper catalogs and their .pdf copies are much easier to use than the web pages that have been replacing them.
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The line between cellphones and internet is thin, since most of what the cellphone does is...on the internet.
But the internet/cellphones have affected trades quite a bit.
- Giving directions to a work location is no longer a thing. Just an address is enough.
- Work orders are sent to workers via the internet, instead of being dispatched by radio.
- Work scheduling is often done in real time by computer, and transmitted to workers via the internet.
- Parts ordering is often done by the worker on site, using thei
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Some trades (eg. civil engineering, road repairs and so on) use Google Maps instead of sending out a surveyor. They have a look on Maps, then send the right traffic management for the job, along with the right crews/tools (eg. tarmac/concrete/soil etc). When it's all done, the crew takes pictures, and it all gets added to the records for those GPS co-ordinates.
Next time something happens in the same street, they already know the depth of the water main, likely the pretty precise location of it and that ther
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Trades are *vastly* affected by the internet, because the people fixing things refer to the internet all the time for manuals, to find parts, verify tech bulletins, not to mention booking appointments. In addition, they can take certificate courses on the internet which normally would interfere with their work hours.
No obvious parallels (Score:1)
The Internet rewrote work by making information accessible anywhere anytime. All the paperwork gone, producers and consumers, more often than not completely automated, talking to each other whenever the need arose, with the decision-maker seeing all of it all the time.
That was a real problem and a real bottleneck.
It isn't very clear what real bottlenecks does the "AI" solve. In physics, it tries to solve two problems - lazy students who can't be bothered to study and do problems, and inadequate experiment d
Re: No obvious parallels (Score:3)
All the old paper work was replaced by obtuse workflows and new paper work.
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No paper.
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AI solves many white-collar problems.
- Research is simplified and more straightforward.
- Coding assistants help developers in areas where they are less familiar, like a new API or framework.
- AI is getting quite good at document analysis. For example, today's crop of AI-assisted resume readers, is quite good at pulling important information from resumes, which have no predefined structure. This pattern holds true with many kinds of documents.
- Formulating structured requirements from informal prompts.
If you
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AI doesn't "solve" shit.
- research is replaced with slop and blissful ignorance of what real science is about
- instead of knowing your libraries and language idioms, you paste crap from the prompt with a bunch of bugs
- yes, we know you're a semi-literate moron
- yes, we know you're a semi-literate moron
AI can do for business what an incompetent mid-level manager can - ruin it slowly.
Re: No obvious parallels (Score:1)
"It isn't very clear what real bottlenecks does the "AI" solve"
If you're a teacher, are you the bottleneck? How long are your office hours?
Reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Life long learning we called it. Prepare for the next thing. Think of say, electronics from tube to transistor to IC to early to modern computing. A woman photographer who worked where I was refused to do digital photography. Or at least the impeded it at every chance. After I designed a new process of digital, she then turned her stasis seeking onto me, saying I was too secretive for her to learn. The supervisor said "I have an almost 3 inch thick stack of memos and process outline, and your name is on the distribution list." She ended up losing her job because she refused to adapt.
Point is people have a desire for stasis, somewhat understandable. But if you were a miner, the days of hundreds of men laboring underground are almost over, at least greatly diminished. In my area, the coal mining is now handled by just a few. people and at an incredible pace. If you want employment, you need to look elsewhere. AI now. It is difficult to know firmly where this is going. One thing almost certain is that the present form of AI is a huge bubble, which complicates things. But this is another shift in technology adjacent employment. So I'd be paying close attention to what develops. Best to get in on the ground floor rather than wait too long.
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Re: Reality (Score:1)
The burned out hard drives and power supplies will replace themselves?
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That's something simple for a robot to do. Or there will be so much redundancy that someone will be able to come once a month and do all the swaps.
Who designs and implements the robot. Your humongous datacenter will need a lot of them. Do you design datacenters that you know the implementations?
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Those people are designing robots today. The people who design robots won't go up if there are millions of robots. The whole point of robots is that they only require a handful of actual people. We have had automated tape libraries for years. A hard drive swapping robot wouldn't be that much more complex than a tape swapping robot. Maybe visual alignment gets more difficult, but if the datacenter is designed for robots first and people second then there are robots out there already doing far more advanced jobs.
Do you have an example we can look at? Anyhow, if no one is needed, all done by robots how does that jibe with your statement of all the sad people working in the huge Datacenters, when everything is done by robots. Did you mean to say Sad Robots?
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I believe that data centers for quite some time have been designed to automatically deactivate failed equipment but leave it in place and not replace it. It's just cheaper than sending someone to fix it and the small decrease in performance is accounted for in the design. The entire data center has a defined life dictated by technology advances. This is usually fairly short 3 to 5 years. (AI data centers are shorter).
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Imagine the sad number of people who will be working in a datacenter the size of 20 football fields. They probably won't even be manned 24/7.
Lot's of people are sad anyhow.
Jobs, careers. Working for a living, professionalism. There is a difference.
If you want to be a professional, there are certain aspects of your workalike you have to adapt to - or have the temperament to do The big datacenter example is not uncommon even today in different jobs. Automotive factories are humongous. They use a lot of robots, but the humans inside are just a cog in the machine. Even the engineering jobs are not all that exciting. I have a friend who interv
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Ok well I would never wish a "terribly uninteresting job" on my kids. That's no way to live.
Of course not. but it is the reality. Even for highly placed people. My SO, who was the VP and highest paid person in her company, noted how she was bored at times, and didn't get to do the "exciting" things I did.
My replies have always been "All jobs have good and bad in them - you are doing better than 90 percent of everyone working"
The part I didn't say was "You would freak at some of the things I've had to do. I was on extra hazardous insurance most of the time. Worked with hazardous materials, and
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People do have a desire for stasis, but that desire is overwhelmed by a desire for change. Specifically, people want things to be better, easier, more reliable, more automated.
I'm reminded of a company I worked for a decade ago, that built practice management software for doctors. Doctors are *notorious* for disliking change. Doctors would tell us about bugs in the software. When we told them that the bugs were fixed in the latest version, they would tell us they didn't want the latest version, they wanted
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I'm reminded of a company I worked for a decade ago, that built practice management software for doctors. Doctors are *notorious* for disliking change. Doctors would tell us about bugs in the software. When we told them that the bugs were fixed in the latest version, they would tell us they didn't want the latest version, they wanted the bugs fixed in the version they had!
Medical Doctors have one big issue - they are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. 8^)
Your example reminds me of Video work. Before non-linear editing, A lot of places used the Amiga with a video Toaster board. I used one. So Lightwave had a demonstration at my university. Everyone was wowed. Then someone spoke up. This is great - we need it for the PC. The Lightwave guy said, "We don't make it for the PC, because the Amiga has many custom chips inside, The PC can't do it." Our guy said "You don
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If by job, you mean type of work, not employers, I've had one job in 43 years. I've had 4 employers (only 2 if you don't count selling the business as a change in employer), but Ive always been in the business of designing HVAC, Plumbing, & Fire Protection systems. A lot has changed in that job over the years, but it's still essentially the same job.
I'm not that optimistic. (Score:2)
Maybe this is a personal peculiarity; but I that there's something exquisitely dispiriting about beating your head against people who are stubborn or clueless enough that every conversation is just a baffling sequence of different confusions, some of the repeated from previously. It's a totally different thin
what AI (Score:5, Insightful)
So there's an increase to be had with respect to the efficiency of many types of desk work and then some. Since proofreading and checking stuff will still be required, although of a different nature (not spelling errors but entire missteps and such), there's not a 100% reduction of actual desk work, perhaps 50%? But anyone doing desk work knows that producing text or code is merely a part of their job. You need to figure out what's going on and what that means for your upcoming work. LLMs are a great parlour trick but they aren't going to help much with that. Or at least, I've not seen it capable of doing that. So, big whoop, people will be more productive.
As for other AI, and their impact, sure, being it on and we'll see. For now I'm tired of the hype. Allow me to repeat myself...
On the hype about AI being oh so capable, and going to put everyone out of a job:
When the first AI company CEO lets their AI handle all their financials, I'll start paying attention to the hype. But not until the AI programmers let their AI handle all their financials will I start believing. Indeed, convince me by putting your money where your mouth is. Until then, i won't pay a lot of attention to these AI stories.
On general AI / artificial general intelligence:
I'll believe someone managed to develop full general AI when the news hits of the first company with zero employees, just shareholders / owners.
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
Re:what AI (Score:5, Funny)
and they're not much more than clippy (or autocorrect) on steroids.
More like clippy on LSD if you ask me.
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Pretty good joke, but the story had lots of potential and this was the only official Funny.
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Slashdot's getting "serious" with old age, I guess.
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My main delusion remains solutions. For example, what if negative moderation reduced the moderator's likelihood of getting more mod points to squander in driving the mood into the mud? More difficult to implement, but comments with constructive suggestions or encouragement should make it more likely that identity will receive mod points to bestow. I think it would be nice to lighten the mood around here. (Then again, perhaps dark moods are the only reasonable reactions to the age of Donaldian Decadence?)
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I've been saying the same thing about Agile for years. If Agile is so great, why don't you want Payroll to use it?
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I've had a long look at LLMs and they're not much more than clippy (or autocorrect) on steroids.
I think they're a bit more than that, but assume you're right... have you considered that they're less than three years old? ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022. And the reasoning models that have made them massively more effective in many areas (especially software development) are barely a year old?
If you reason about what will happen in the next decade or two based on where the technology is right now, a technology that didn't even exist five years ago and is still obviously in its infancy, you're cle
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according to credible sources, LLMs have practically reached their limits
What sources? And when? I think the conclusions your citing predate the reasoning overlay models... and reasoning seems like exactly the right solution to both of the problems you cite.
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The detail is helpful (Score:2)
When people worry about AI taking all our jobs, they *are* thinking in terms like specific jobs being automated away. They can't see what new jobs will be created, and suggesting that they will surely be created, doesn't convince or help.
This analysis of what happened with the dawn of the internet is helpful in this way. It breaks down what kinds of jobs were lost, and what new kinds of jobs were created. We need more of this kind of analysis.
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I agree. This is the first article that I've seen that isn't either over-hyped "LLMs will rule the world!" or all gloom and doom "AI is shit" yet at the same time "AI will eliminate all work and humans will starve to death".
The article contains a nuanced view that explores how the Internet affected things from 1999 to now (essentially) and makes an analogy that speaks to how LLM AI might play out now. This may not be the end of the analysis, but it is a lot more insightful than what has come before it.
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Thanks for responding. Sometimes I feel like the only sane person in the room, especially reading the comments on this article. It's nice to know there's another person out there that gets it.
It reminds me of Y2K, I had to talk all kinds of people, including friends and relatives, off the ledge.
Re: The detail is helpful (Score:1)
Did you just say submissive engineers who kiss the bosses' lower orifice and do whatever annoying intrusive stupid crap is asked of them, be it items jumping around on the screen so you habitually click on the wrong items, or ever more intrusive ads with mute button disabled, are you saying those engineers will always have jobs?
I thought "manager" was to avoid paying overtime (Score:2)
From the summary:
Today, the share of workers in professional and managerial occupations has more than doubled since the dawn of the digital era.
I was under the impression that overtime pay is now mandatory, but not for people in "management." So over the last 25 years, many menial job titles have acquired the word "manager" in their name. So a cleaner is now a "sanitation manager," a warehouse guy is an "inventory manager" etc.
i.e, the increase in "management" roles has nothing to do with the internet revolution as the article implies, but is about minimising how much people get paid. I'm not in the USA though, can anyone else comm
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They''re called "Exempt employees". Certain professional, technical, and managerial employees are exempted from the overtime requirement of the Fair Standards Labor Act.
If a business wants to avoid trouble with the state and federal authorities, they need to follow certain guidelines when classifying employees as Exempt or Hourly.
These vary a little from state to state.
In California there are tests which determine whether an employee can be classified as Exempt or Hourly. These are Salary Threshold, Salary
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That does clarify, thanks.
Sounds Great (Score:2)
Sounds great. So long as you're not today's travel agent analog, you might survive.
Regardless, even after you've starved, a new shiny AI economy will rise with several AI related jobs. Some will be jobs that we haven't even thought of yet. But, that won't help you nor the national unemployment rate.
13,000 Verizon employees jobless for Christmas. Hurray AI!
There is a functional difference (Score:2)
So now you have discount LCARS, not really accomplishing m
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AI will take "most" of our jobs in the same way that the internet took "most" of yesterday's jobs. In the case of the internet, there were more, better jobs than before. I suspect the same will be true of the AI revolution.
Re:There there now little Pleb... (Score:5, Insightful)
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When it comes to "replacing workers" AI is far from a new phenomenon. Every invention ever, has been about "replacing workers." And every invention ever, depended on "replacing workers" to be financially viable.
That $300K farm combine replaces 20-30 workers. https://ironsolutions.com/a-br... [ironsolutions.com] It depends for its financial viability, on replacing those 20-30 workers.
And so it has always been. Yes, even the internet itself depends on "replacing workers" for its financial viability.
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What's the difference?
Produce more with the same workers = produce the same with less workers. Both reduce the number of humans needed to produce X number of crops.
And even if it mattered, I don't think you have a clue what farmers wanted. I've worked on farms and have family members who own farms, ranging from single-family farms, to a farm system big enough to have its own trucking line, and land in 22 states. I can tell you that in both cases they are interested in reducing the number of workers needed,
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They managed the number of people working for them but decreasing labor costs were not the main focus
You have no evidence, other than your opinion, to make this claim. Decreasing labor costs was absolutely the main focus. Why else would a farmer buy a machine that could replace 20-30 workers, if not to reduce labor costs? If reducing labor costs was not the main focus, then they could just keep hiring people and not mess with the big, expensive machine.
A grocery bagger who made 25 cents an hour back then could live much better than someone making the equivalent $13 per hour today.
This is false. In the 1930's, grocery sackers made about 25 cents per hour. Adjusting for inflation, that would be $5.97 today. https://www.bls.gov/data/inf [bls.gov]
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Changing the year to 1950 and the pay rate to .75 / hr doesn't change the incorrectness of your statement. The inflation calculator says that that .75 in 1950 would be $10.37 today. What that means is that, *adjusted for inflation*, your sacker would still be doing *better* today at $13 an hour, than he was doing in 1950 at .75 an hour.
People today have *more* discretionary income than they did in 1950. It's just that our standards have changed.
- In 1950, *nobody* had more than one car. Today, the average f
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It's true that some things have increased in cost faster than inflation. But you don't get to just pick those things, leaving out all the other things that have *decreased* in cost, and claim that life is worse now. Inflation and real wages take into account *all* the things a family needs, not just the ones that have experienced the highest price increases.
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You are still picking and choosing. Poor people, like everyone else, have to buy all kinds of things. Some of those things are rising in price, some are falling. Your hand-picked examples do not prove your point. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, on the other hand, goes to great lengths to select a representative "basket of goods" to include in their inflation indexes. These inflation indicators *do* include the cost of housing, food, medicine, and every other category of things people have to buy.
I know very
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I don't disagree. Poor people do have more trouble paying for necessities. It's kind of what it means to be...poor. But that doesn't invalidate the CPI.
Consider housing, for example. When I was young and poor (and yes, I *was* poor), I made ends meet by...getting a roommate. That's still a thing. My boys both did that as they were starting out, just a handful of years ago. It's *not* a travesty to be forced to get a roommate. You don't want a roommate? Get a better job! That's a good thing! Each person can
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There is *always* a better job. It might not be easy to find, it might require some training, and it might not be in the small town where you live, but it exists. The question is, how much effort are you (or the person in question) willing to spend locating and pursuing that job?
I moved 700 miles from my parents' home at age 18 to find that job, and moved at least that far again three times in my career, in pursuit of a better job. I have a *great* job! Some people have reasons they don't want to move 700 m
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Actually, I make a little less than average for my position. My house is paid in full, I have no debts. I work from home, so my commute is walking up the stairs to my home office. I live in a quiet, safe, tree-covered community where kids play in the streets and walk themselves to school and neighbors help each other. My coworkers respect me and allow me to do my job. I start work at 8 and stop at 5, and I don't check my emails or Teams messages when I'm not working, including on vacation. In my book, that'
Re: There there now little Pleb... (Score:1)
So is the internet better today, or only the jobs?
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I for one wouldn't want to go back to a world with no internet. Been there, done that.
Nor would I want to go back to a world without internet-enabled jobs. Done that too.
Of all human inventions, I'd say the internet is the most beneficial to mankind, even more than the computer itself. There's a reason today's computers are little more than a gateway to the internet.
So yes, in my view, both the internet *and* jobs are better today.