This is IBM. I read this as - we plan to justify laying off our most senior employees due to not reskilling due to AI. This is just another MBA planning their own promo doc.
Speaking as an ex-IBMer, even if you reskill they'll still resource action you in favor or someone younger and less well compensated because experience isn't on the list of check boxes they care about.
All the talk about reskilling is just so you stay calm and comfortable while the cows in front of you get a bolt to the head.
Reskilling is useful to help you find an external job more than an internal one in my experience.
Yeah, a common refrain internally was the I stood for India.
I know the Kyndryl spin out recently made a decision that US based roles will be limited going forward due to cost goals and have been "workforce rebalancing" teams instead of allowing them to go to the bench to find new roles. The same is not true for offshore resources.
There are a lot of US Restricted roles due to government contracts - I can't remember if it's a legal requirement or a contract restriction. However I do know it's not universal as less sensitive work absolutely did use off shore resources.
Is that before or after Watson has put a bunch of doctors out of work?
My feeling is that the level of changes in 3 years will be more akin to introducing a new version of software with some new capabilities rather than something more radical.
Societies across the world need to start focusing on Eternal Automation. The goal is for everyone to benefit from collective advances. So what if someone doesn't want to work and has 10 kids; if even half of those kids end up working to contribute to the worldwide implementation of systematized structures which free us from corporate control; though that struggle will be very real, then it's worth paying people not to work and instead incentivizing those who do with advanced access to new structural creations.
There is no reason to continue as we have. What gets you to where you're going isn't generally needed once you get there. We don't hike to the park only to hike up the mountain; we drive, then hike, then picnic or have sex (generally both). We must not let corporations or the greedy define what work and prosperity means.
The unstated suggestion here seems to be that the government is not already THE (and best) system of control.
The market didn't outlaw slavery (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The market didn't limit the work week to 40 hours (because it loved the profits); the government did.
The government is the moral conscience of the people. The market is a mindless paperclip maximizer. You can't expect it to care about anything individuals care about, like not being slaves or being healthy or having a life.
The market didn't put billions in some politician friend's pocket; the government did.
The market didn't put people in jail because the system has failed them; the government did.
The market didn't decide that drugs are bad while financing the very drug lords in tropical countries that are dealing in our streets; the government did.
The market didn't pass a law to permit themselves to skirt the law. They asked, but the government signed.
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What you call the market is the combination of economics and politics. But the market itself, the free trade among people, is a neutral party and a chaotic self-driven mechanism. But if someone has the power to dictate what is a valid trade and what is not, to put tariffs on A and not on B, the market stops being a neutral chaotic equilibrium and instead tends to accumulate money on one side rather than the other.
Because in the smaller scope, where government action is not as heavy handed, the market works beautifully. Every shop in my high street thrives and dies the same way: good products = profit. Bad products = death, and get replaced by someone better.
That is, until someone that got huge thanks to government action (i.e. favour and corruption) can just destroy this equilibrium by opening a Walmart causing every shop to die.
What you call the market, almost as a slur, is the same mechanism we have had for thousands of years. Monopoly, exploitation of labour, squeezing money from the poor to make the rich even richer is governmental action. You don't become a trillion dollar company without many good friends in the palace. Nor it is the "division of labour" that money and trade enable that made the trillion dollar company.
The market is the convenient scapegoat for the thieves running the show.
> The unstated suggestion here seems to be that the government is not already THE (and best) system of control.
There are many form of government. Which form do you speak of? We must've lost so many idealists and visionaries in the past 150 years, that we have stopped dreaming a better, fairer world for everybody, and just decided that this is the best we can do. Maybe voting for the other colour next time will help, who knows. Whatever can one do?
The market did all those things; acts characterized as government are services traded on the market. Yeah, there are formal restrictions on doing that, but just as free marketeers bleat that regulation of more conventional goods doesn’t stop them from being traded and creats a black market still guided by market forces, that's also true of government acts.
People who use appeal to the market to sell political ideas never seem to apply their logic consistently, tailoring their description of what buying and selling is “market” based on what they are trying to sell you.
> But the market itself, the free trade among people, is a neutral party and a chaotic self-driven mechanism.
The market is not a party at all, it is an abstraction describing interactions of all the parties; and it is no more neutral than the ultimate outcome of the aggregate of interactions is.
> The market did all those things; acts characterized as government are services traded on the market.
We live in a world dominated by trade, everything has a price and an index. But here you're saying that the chicken came before the egg rather than viceversa. I wouldn't be so sure.
The point I'm making is that there is the market, and there is the government. The one that has the power to affect the other is the government itself, with its laws and tariffs and monopoly over violence. The result is some kind of symbiosis, of course, but everything started in the king's court, not the other way around.
Blaming the market for the ills of our world is like blaming the Internet for the existence of revenge porn. Both money and the internet are simply a technology to exchange information and some form of energy, and if it didn't exist, people would invent it (see black markets)
> The point I’m making is that there is the market, and there is the government.
And my point is that that’s a an artificial, politically motivated distortion of reality.
> Blaming the market for the ills of our world i
I’m not doing that. I’m pointing out why giving the market blame or credit for anything is pointless, and only possible through selective, ends-directed reasoning.
The move to the 40-hour workweek was driven by striking and spilled blood in the labor movement for multiple centuries. The auto industry doesn't even make the top ten.
Isn't the trend that developed nations are starting to plateau, and global population is expected to peak in the next few decades? I'm actually more worried about the opposite problem in the short term. With birth rates so low, the folks being born now are going to be supporting a disproportionately large elderly population.
There is no population crisis that's 100% propaganda. We have so much arable land yet to be developed, oceans yet to be fully utilized. The Earth can easily hold 1 trillion people. The only ones promoting population control are the people who make money off of labor scarcity and fear.
A trillion people. 100 times as many people as today. Think about that for a second and get back to me with how we’re going to maintain our lifestyle with the demands we already put on lumber, copper, etc.
Less that two percent of the population is involved in growing food today. Not sure how we’ll have starvation as a major issue due to “under population”.
Yes, that is a good place to start from. Look at it this way: we have starvation in the world at that 2% due to both issues growing food and indirect issues (transportation, fuel, lack of opportunity, corruption.) If agriculture jobs were forced to 2.5%, what kind of pressure would that put on everything else involved in successfully distributing food. And what would that in turn do to the percentage forced to do more localized agriculture or subsistence work. And what would the costs of and political/behavioral (over)reactions to the shock and the unevenness of each of those adjustments be.
That's slightly naive. Every time we get an uplift in efficiency, capitalism demands we produce more. Either by product diversity, by inventing and marketing things nobody knew they wanted (and usually, need) or just more (so we can throw away more; consider food waste alone).
Systemic change needs more than technological preconditions. Or in other words: Why would "corporate control" just give up its power?
People doubt this, and maybe the percentage is too high, or the time horizon too low. But it's coming without a doubt.
Remember the times about 15-20 years ago when people were dishing good money on DSLR. Professional photographers were complaining that amateurs come in and lower both the quality and the prices charged. Well, after everyone now has a camera in their pocket that rivals a professional DSLR from 20 years ago, everyone can make decent photos. Not Ansel-Adams-levels, but usable photos.
AI will be like iPhone cameras on steroids. A lot of people will be able to do a lot of things, not at professional level, but at passable level. Very soon live speech translation will be a thing on a smartphone. How many professional translators will still have a job?
TLDR (b/c AI predictions are overhyped): "Fluctuation Exists" in systems (including economic systems, societies, mechanical systems, etc.)
A modern, industrialized, knowledge-centric economy is constantly having to re-skill. (It seems to be largely due to innovation, but I am just guessing.)
e.g. A new technology comes in-- creating a rise demand for skills to use it, and a decline in demand for skills to use what it replaces.
The dichotomy of skills entering into and leaving importance & scarcity is apparent via the following lists of occupations:
"Motion picture projectionist" is one of the top 5 occupations with the highest projected growth..? In 2023? Color me doubtful!
Both lists have items that really make one scratch their head. The movie one specifically really feels like someone started plotting a line from 2020, during the height of the pandemic, to right now, with Barbenheimer, and is treating that tiny window as the trend line representing meaningful growth (rather than looking at theater performance as a whole, which is still about half of what it was at its peak in 2018/2019.
Sad to see Nuclear power reactor operators, Nuclear technicians, Power plant operators in the fast decline list, hopefully that's from improved automation and maybe green energy and not from anything truly regressive.
The reason is that now tools like ChatGPT allow workers to do more with less knowledge, as noted by the report.
I've seen people use ChatGPT in my team, this statement isn't really inline with my observations. Those using it are not really more productive than anyone else, if anything I've noted they became a bit frustrated and just back off usage? Anyone else?
I'm quite keen to use it more in my side projects, I just don't really see the time pay off to invest learning it yet so I've not bothered to upgrade from 3.5 to 4. I just dabble with 3.5 occasionally.
> I'm quite keen to use it more in my side projects, I just don't really see the time pay off to invest learning it…
I think using it for side projects is where it shines, especially if you’re talking about coding side projects.
In my N=1 experience with coding, it can save me a ton of time by iteratively providing code and saving me time looking up documentation to find correct functions and syntax. ChatGPT frequently shows me functions that I wasn’t aware existed. It also can give me cleaner and/or more idiomatic code.
So a function or class that may have previously taken me 45 - 60 minutes to build, now takes 5-10 minutes. This is a huge productivity increase. It’s not some magic pill that builds whole applications, but it’s like having an experienced (but not expert) programmer by your side with unlimited patience for your questions. (This also applies to non-programming tasks as well.)
And it hasn’t taken me any time investment in learning it. I just have an iterative conversation with it, including asking it clarifying questions and requesting it to modify the code it provides.
Are you experiencing something different than what I’ve described?
My experience is that chatgpt consistently showed me API functions that don’t exist. But I tend to do very obscure things in embedded, that googling for can be tricky or impossible. At first I had high hopes, because the shape of the code is good, and the logic looks good, but when I go to look up details of the parts I actually need help with, they’re just made up functions, like placeholders I might write until I can go back and implement them.
Where it’s shined for me was writing code where I couldn’t be bothered to put together ideas from several distinct tutorials. It’s fantastic for writing code that you can basically google for, even if you have to read several disperate pages to get a clear picture of what to do.
> was writing code where I couldn’t be bothered to put together ideas from several distinct tutorials. It’s fantastic for writing code that you can basically google for, even if you have to read several disperate pages to get a clear picture of what to do.
I think this description of yours nails it.
Soon, though, you’ll be able to feed it a corpus of documentation and/or library code and question it based on those. That might help your use case.
I've been writing an open gl based game engine for scratch, but I'm using c#, which means I'm using a lot of bindings for libs that only really exist in c++. Because of this chat gpt seems to get stuck on functions that don't exist in my context
Side projects benefit greatly from ChatGPT because usually:
- the projects are small in scale, meaning ChatGPT needs less context, and stereotypical solutions probably work quite well
- you're not a domain expert (as opposed to your paying job, which hopefully you are an expert in the niche there), this means relatively speaking ChatGPT can help you more, whereas if you're a domain expert, you probably outperform ChatGPT anyway.
That said, ChatGPT often replaced Googling and stackoverflow when I need to look up how some things are done. The benefit is that I get to ask very specific questions and get to ask follow up questions.
It really depends on what they are doing with ChatGPT. Lots of people use it like a team member and these people are often amazed at first and later frustrated . When people worn with it programmatically or as part of their flow then I never see them stepping away from ChatGPT and other LLMs that are able to generate results. Look at the research into agent based problem exploration. Using the right combination of prompts, result storage and further prompting mixing results with the further prompts, amazing results are possible.
Do you have any examples of these workflows or what sorts of results are possible. For me ChatGPT has been relegated to synonyms and small trivia lookup. I've been keeping an eye out for such things but I've stopped checking on it and figured I would eventually hear about it somehow.
The challenge is in determining who is about to become obsolete and that is not clear. For example OOP remains the most popular and requested programming paradigm even though it has gradually slid into functional obsolescence more than a decade ago[1].
Even still legacy code will remain in use and talent to maintain legacy systems will remain in demand. My university still teaches COBOL because there still exists demand for people to maintain these legacy applications even if new applications are no longer written in that language.
> OOP remains the most popular and requested programming paradigm even though it has gradually slid into functional obsolescence more than a decade ago…
I read your link. It was an interesting essay. But how is OOP functionally obsolete?
The economic incentive for OOP is absolutely gone and cannot be recovered. The technical purpose of OOP is mostly gone and no longer desirable. The continued desirability of OOP is some variable combination of aesthetic and social. While those qualities are not without value they aren't functional, thus OOP remains popular but certainly not for reasons of utility or necessity. Other approaches now achieve superior desirability when considered only from a utility perspective. That means OOP is functionally obsolete.
