Brutal. I think AI led to my being laid off as a software developer, too. It's not quite so clear as the examples here for copywriters, but the company was very interested in using AI to ease the workload, and I can't even say I disagreed with it. I was using it myself.
I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees.
I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.
The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to". It's called budgeting, and the ceiling only represents existential limits for small or dying businesses. The rest of the time, it is defined only to maximize profit, which means using their power to shift the negative part of economic changes onto individuals as much as mathematically possible, rather than the business suffering proportionately.
Engineers (both HW and SW) are often fantastically bad at understanding how business works, including where their salary comes from and how much value they are producing, versus how small the % of the value they produced is which gets returned to them as their salary.
This problem is acute with older hardware and manufacturing engineers who drank all the corporate propaganda they've been fed for decades. I once worked with a senior manufacturing engineer who didn't clock his overtime because he didn't want the huge, multinational corporation we worked for to go bankrupt.
> How do the wealthy get so wealthy? Mostly by some form of cheating. One way that's relevant to one current case is depicted in Philip Roth's 2004 novel 'The Plot Against America':
> "Every subcontractor when he comes into the office on Friday to collect money for the lumber, the glass, the brick, Abe says, 'Look, we're out of money, this is the best I can do,' and he pays them a half, a third -- if he can get away with it, a quarter -- and these people need the money to survive, but this is the method that Abe learned from his father. He's doing so much building that he gets away with it..."
Nobody wants to stop using AI but people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future and people bored by AI. But as there will be an interrupted continuity the next generation will be…
Competition is hard so we have to use AI to stay competitive - last time I read similar was… testimonies of concentration camp guards when they were asked why they overlooked atrocities.
> people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future
Can you tell me more? Everything I've read indicates it affects juniors/new devs more. Is that what you mean by a 'senior-free' future? One in which there are no seniors in 10-20 years because there are no juniors now?
I would say "yes" because a) they don't have to demean themselves by racing to the bottom against an AI b) they no longer have to work for such a scummy company.
(Of course, I'm not being 100% serious, and your personal financial situation may be at odds with the tone of this comment)
My partner is / was a copywriter. She was already a bit fatigued by it even before the whole AI thing. She's still finding bits of work but is pivoting into AI herself now.
I think of it like all the other jobs from yesteryear that you hardly ever see. Lamplighter, elevator operator, farrier. People used to form gangs and smash up the mechanical spinning looms.
Usually the implication of this (very common) analogy is that people in the past were somehow behaving wrongly, despite the fact that anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built, regardless of what the best solution is theoretically. Though even beyond that, the comparison is thin. With AI disruption, the size of the total affected jobs in comparison to the entire economy, as well as the speed of the change, is much more significant.
I think they were behaving wrongly yes because the one constant in life is change whatever you do and whatever species you are. Adapt or die surely? The universe isn't a museum.
> anybody is right to fight savagely against dramatic disruption to the life they've built
Yeah, I'd built a whole lifestyle around armed robbery, and the cops had the gall to arrest me. It was dramatically disruptive!
Seriously, you do not have a "right" to keep doing whatever you've been doing, even if it wasn't destructive. Nobody owes you that. People aren't your serfs.
The village blacksmith of 1934, it was clear, had to learn new skills to survive.
“The influence of the automobile has driven the horse from the city’s streets,” according to the article. “The blacksmith now earns his livelihood by straightening automobile axles, repairing broken springs and welding frames.”
It's telling that you compare specialized creative work, like making art, to "jobs" like standing in an elevator.
Nobody would miss washroom attendants disappearing either. That is different from automating away the stuff that makes life interesting. Like AI startups telling you that their robot will spend time with your friends and family, so you don't have to. Being disgusted by that is not being a luddite, it's being a well adjusted human with aspirations beyond doomscrolling AI slop on tiktok/youtube.
I find myself hoping that my sector is one of the last to be destroyed and that before I personally get laid off, the masses will have fought for and won some kind of UBI or assistance or jobs program or something. Just hope this situation resolves itself before it comes for me.
I also had this feeling during the 2020 crash... and during the 2008-2012 crash...
I know a few people active as copy/documentation writers. The job is definitely changing and it is harder to find gigs for these people. But large companies still need experienced copy editors in charge of their documentation. They just don't expect that writing it is a manual job anymore. Smaller companies, get away with making this a part time thing that people do on the side.
The job has changed. At the same time, the quality and quantity expectations are changing as well. You don't get away with doing the same amount of documentation anymore. AI tools enable more documentation and more comprehensive documentation. So, having that now becomes the norm.
But if your job is getting paid per word for text, then yes, that market is a bit smaller now. But it's not all gone and people still get hired to coordinate the documentation writing process or for high quality journalism.
But if you were writing filler content for a news paper or low value (it has to be there, but nobody cares) documentation for some software component, then yes, your job is definitely at risk.
In my experience, marketers wanted quick and catchy copy to post on linked-in and copywriters obliged. It reached a point where the content was irrelevant. You just had to get something posted on linked-in and get engagement. It was all slop long before AI came along. Nothing useful is posted (to linked-in) because the quality of the posts has been so low for so long that you don't even notice that it is turned into AI slop. All corporate 'news' and 'blog' pages are the same. Copywriters left us a long time ago.
Can we please stop saying "AI is doing this", "AI is doing that", and instead point out at the companies and individuals that are shoveling AI down our throats as the ones that are decimating industries or destroying jobs, almost exclusively for their own economical benefit?
Framing it as "AI" only leads to ignoring the responsibility of those who are making those decisions. It's exactly the same argument behind justifying things as "market forces": it allows everything and makes nobody responsible for it.
No, "AI" is part of progress like other force multipliers. For the Hoover dam, the government hired thousands of people. Today you would have hundreds. What enables that is machinery. Do we want to go back to manual labor? What about paralegals? Hundreds of people reading thousands of paper documents. Or a few paralegals and lawyers reviewing AI output and following up manually to confirm?
What people seem to be against is progress, or at least the rate of progress. We certainly should stop and think and assess the repercussions of the rate of progress and the response we should have were it to threaten to destabilize society. I don't think we should say, oh, A.I., this is where I will fight. We need to be rational and assess the consequences and find rational answers to ensure social stability (we don't want famine or Hoovervilles).
This is deliberate from both the left and the right to keep costs down. "AI" is ambient and no one can pin the blame on anyone.
In my industry -- software engineering -- AI is being blamed for a job market that tumbled a year before GPT even entered the mainstream. There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame AI because it doesnt force us to really examine the causes and thus no policy changes would result.
In SWE-land, we done hire people because of three reasons
1. better open source means you dont need to build it on your own
2. More h1/h4/opt visa workers means you can have loyal and under-market pay workers without attrition risk (even Trump with all his power couldnt tackle this lobby)
3. offshore -- us healthcare and benefits are too expensive, easier to just send the work to other countries
> There were no code assist tools in 2022, but jobs disappeared.
In 2020 there was a global pandemic called COVID-19 that had a pronounced affect on the world economy. Stimulus cheques were given to companies to keep them afloat through this time. Tech companies spent that new capital on hiring and them layed off a lot of workers when they weren't able to sustain them.
A big reason you saw layoffs is because we had massive hiring sprees from short term capital through stimulus cheques.
These days, when a company tells you they are laying off good workers and replacing them, with software that cannot fact check its output, because their audience cannot tell the difference, you should believe them and consider if that is really what you want the world to become.
It also rubs me the wrong way since "AI" quite literally means everything from LLMs to how the ghosts in Pacman move.
Like, you don't hate AI. You hate the way it's being used. It would be weird to say "I hate that computers have the ability to transpose spoken language to text". Or "I can't stand the ambient listening tool being used to treat my father's UTI's while he has Alzheimer's". Or even better "I hate that my credit card company is trying to determine whether someone is fraudulently using it".
And what's worse is that it treats this is a relatively new problem. But rich people abusing the system to make more money at the cost of making others poor is hardly a new thing.
> If your job is cut by AI, you've been producing mediocrity anyway.
In my opinion it’s unfortunate and inaccurate to frame this as most likely being a problem with the quality of the work of a person who was let go or who can’t find a job. It’s very possible that management thinks AI is just good enough to justify not hiring someone for the role.
Most people are doing bullshit jobs. Are we surprised they are automated away? Taste and general intelligence won't be imho. That's all I'm saying. Take agency over the career you're building. Too many people settle for whatever.
All I was saying is that your framing was callous and also likely terribly inaccurate. It assumes that management always assesses layoffs and technology adoption rationally and objectively based on merits without influence by hype, advertising, or other external forces. People are frequently laid off randomly at large companies. Layoffs at big companies often don't involve someone saying "get rid of these specific 20 copy writers because their copy is worse than what an AI produces". They will ignore performance of individuals completely and instead reduce headcount randomly across a cost center. That doesn't mean that every person who was let go was "producing mediocrity".
Most of humanity is mediocre. Very few people are excellent. You're response of "touch luck, just be better" to a population with a mean IQ of 100 will lead to pitchforks in the streets.
I'm talking about writers and software developers. Not everyone. The mob is already here, in the comments.
You can't automate taste so far. That's why I'm saying: if you, as a writer, bring no taste because you're the equivalent of a code money, what are you expecting?
> That's why I'm saying: if you, as a writer, bring no taste because you're the equivalent of a code money, what are you expecting?
You're assuming "Writer laid of must be because org did not find them to be a very good writer".
The issue,
#1, unless you're yourself an editor or a former writer, you really can't distinguish between moderate and excellent writing. (I know someone personally who's very experienced, and I struggled while actively trying to make out the tells in the quality of writing. The difference between good and great writing can be very subtle.)
Bigger issue #2 is, the board DGAF about any of this.
If they can get a sloppy write up for free with their chatgpt subscription instead of a fair human price, who cares if the quality and brand value drops and the company goes bankrupt? That's an issue 5 years from now, good thing the CEO's already retired by then, right?
Not sure my point gets across tbh. What you describe is that the person getting fired is "only a writer" to the board. I think that ship has sailed. Call it personal brand, taste, whatever. I think you need to provide more nowadays than "I can do exactly this predefined job". I find it hard to find the right words right now.
Do I think that this is a good thing? No. I don't think most people have taste (tm) nor that we should live in a world where only the most distinguished have work. I'm just observing what happens in my world. Maybe it's going to burn us all to the ground, but it is what it is if you wanna make money.
I can understand if you're saying that perhaps the writer should also contribute in a more holistic way, get their contributions upstreamed etc. That does make sense.
Only thig is I'm not sure how many CEOs/orgs care about writers going above and beyond. A small firm run by a sensible person, sure. But I don't think most of these jobs are from small players.
A shocking number of people are so well below mediocre that its kind of amazing how okayish we get by even pre AI. Makes me thing there is more robustness than you might expect given terrible numbers.
For example what seemed crazy to me that as a country Greece somehow had and still has ~half of their households *primary* source of income being pensions.
I can't even paint them in a sinister light. They couldn't afford me, and now they had a way to get all the work done with their other developers that were less senior. They were clearly sad to let me go, but they didn't see that they had any choice financially. They weren't a big FAANG company with jillions of dollars. They only had a couple dozen employees.
I do wonder how people are going to get to be senior anything in the future, though. It's only going to be people who are really into it that are willing to work that hard to make it happen. The alternative, AI, is just so much easier than it's hard to justify putting that much effort into learning it, unless it's your thing.
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