Saturday, April 20, 2024

Never Underestimate the Suckerdom of Bosses

A while back Cory Doctorow rather nicely summed up what I suspect is (contrary to the past decade's Frey-Benedikt study-kickstarted hype, and the post-Open AI GPT-3.5 hype too) the real state of progress in applying artificial intelligence to the vast majority of tasks workers actually perform: "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job," but "we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job."

For the worker who gets fired, alas, that the bot they were replaced with fails to do their job is cold comfort. They remain fired, after all--and the odds of their getting a phone call asking them to come back (never mind come back and get compensated for what they were put through) seem to me very slim indeed.

Such is the reality of the relationship between power and responsibility, above all in the Market.

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