I am so tired of every tech bro telling us how AI will change the world without giving us any concrete examples

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Legal document review and direct redlining that is on par with junior lawyers. We haven’t had to hire because AI gets us most of the way there. Also built an AI agent to do routine legal tasks so our team stays small and focuses on more senior level judgment calls and litigation strategy

So without junior lawyers how do we get senior lawyers who can make judgment calls?

If I'm a client, I don't care about the skills development of junior lawyers--I care about getting the best value for the money, which will probably mean working with a practice that is using AI instead of helping train up future legal minds.

(Is this a good thing? Probably not! But I don't think that folks paying for legal services have any interest in paying more than they need to for the sake of the profession's future.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our PTA was able to create advertisement for school shows without engaging a designer.

I can analyze large economic data without a junior analyst. We still hire juniors, they are just expected to learn "how to think" right away instead of being on the execution front for a couple of years.

The PTA is a great example of why AI won’t change the economy. 10 years ago it would have been absurd for a PTA to hire a designer for a school play flyer!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:On a very micro level, our neighbor used to have his own graphic design business creating logos and other graphics for local restaurants and small businesses.

He said AI has eradicated all his business. It’s just too easy for a small business to use AI to create graphics over the course of an hour or two that he would have spent weeks perfecting with a client. He is “lucky” in that he is late 50s and saved a ton, so he can pretty much retire…but his freelance days are over.

When I was in college our sorority was too poor to hire a designer, I designed logos using adobe photoshop for our events, that’s a solid Sunday afternoon gone.

But I don’t know what else a 19 year old is supposed to do on sundays lol

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Please tell us in the most concrete and specific terms possible, exactly what tasks AI has done in your organization that were previously done by a human. I don't want to hear that your organization has replaced 30 employees when that's what it has done every year for the past two decades because it just likes to hire and fire people. I also don't want to hear about how you vibe coded an app that no one will ever use. I want to hear about the specific, recent things (i.e., past six months or so) that AI has suddenly done within your company that has already replaced work previously done by humans. No speculation about what will happen in the future; I want examples that have already happened.

Revolut for example has rolled out AI power human like chat bot agents when you call up. Customers in many cases do not believe they are talking to a AI powered chat bot.

In China their version of the Home shopping network they now use AI models to seel produts.

In China their version of Starbucks uses facial recgonition to start order as you enter and then charges your account based off that. No human interaction needed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our PTA was able to create advertisement for school shows without engaging a designer.

I can analyze large economic data without a junior analyst. We still hire juniors, they are just expected to learn "how to think" right away instead of being on the execution front for a couple of years.

The PTA is a great example of why AI won’t change the economy. 10 years ago it would have been absurd for a PTA to hire a designer for a school play flyer!

To be fair, the never would have actually hired anyone. They would have just convinced some mom with design skills to do it (for the children!) Now I guess that mom has more time to doomscroll while her kids are at school being taught by AI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm a teacher and we are being forced to use AI to provide feedback on student work. It is bad, the kids know and don't like it, and the writing is on the wall: it is only a matter of time before our roles degenerate into crowd control aides only. This will do so much damage to kids; quality of education has already been degraded by screens/tech. I expect there will be a generation sacrificed to the AI teaching experiment before it is generally understood that this will hurt and not help.

Seeing this already at my kid's junior high. the teachers have handed more than 50% of their work over to Google. They've become tech facilitators rather than teachers, and if the child is failing, they pawn that failure off on the child and parents and their failure to follow the lessons and schedules on Google. They've washed their hands of any responsibility. Long gone are the days when teachers actually stayed after school to tutor kids like my high school math teacher did because he loved teaching and cared about the kids.

[Anonymous]

What you are saying here is you're not on GitHub, Substack, LinkedIn, or any of the places where people talk about the specific things they're building. You don't go to meetups where people demo their tools. Your version of curiosity is "posting here and demanding people tell you."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What you are saying here is you're not on GitHub, Substack, LinkedIn, or any of the places where people talk about the specific things they're building. You don't go to meetups where people demo their tools. Your version of curiosity is "posting here and demanding people tell you."

Not OP but that's a bit harsh. No one is going to attend tool demos outside of their field. This is a way of casting a broad net and getting (hopefully) real world responses from people not trying to pitch the latest, next big thing.

[Anonymous]

The daily just did an episode on this

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What you are saying here is you're not on GitHub, Substack, LinkedIn, or any of the places where people talk about the specific things they're building. You don't go to meetups where people demo their tools. Your version of curiosity is "posting here and demanding people tell you."

This comment exemplifies the problem. The prediction engine works very well in coding and other predictable disciplines. But tech bros are too far out ahead of their skis in so many areas they really don’t understand the lack of utility.

That’s ok. Let’s see where this all leads.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Please tell us in the most concrete and specific terms possible, exactly what tasks AI has done in your organization that were previously done by a human. I don't want to hear that your organization has replaced 30 employees when that's what it has done every year for the past two decades because it just likes to hire and fire people. I also don't want to hear about how you vibe coded an app that no one will ever use. I want to hear about the specific, recent things (i.e., past six months or so) that AI has suddenly done within your company that has already replaced work previously done by humans. No speculation about what will happen in the future; I want examples that have already happened.

Why do you keep posting this? You clearly don't know tech if you think its going to change the world right away? All tech eventually changes the world and its not necessarily a bad thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What you are saying here is you're not on GitHub, Substack, LinkedIn, or any of the places where people talk about the specific things they're building. You don't go to meetups where people demo their tools. Your version of curiosity is "posting here and demanding people tell you."

This comment exemplifies the problem. The prediction engine works very well in coding and other predictable disciplines. But tech bros are too far out ahead of their skis in so many areas they really don’t understand the lack of utility.

That’s ok. Let’s see where this all leads.

You clearly don't know anyone in tech.... its not replacing people and needs a lot of human help.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What you are saying here is you're not on GitHub, Substack, LinkedIn, or any of the places where people talk about the specific things they're building. You don't go to meetups where people demo their tools. Your version of curiosity is "posting here and demanding people tell you."

Well yes, most people are not on those sites and don't work in tech, so they are asking those people what the hype is about. But there's never a real answer other than you would know if you used the right AI.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Legal document review and direct redlining that is on par with junior lawyers. We haven’t had to hire because AI gets us most of the way there. Also built an AI agent to do routine legal tasks so our team stays small and focuses on more senior level judgment calls and litigation strategy

So without junior lawyers how do we get senior lawyers who can make judgment calls?

If I'm a client, I don't care about the skills development of junior lawyers--I care about getting the best value for the money, which will probably mean working with a practice that is using AI instead of helping train up future legal minds.

(Is this a good thing? Probably not! But I don't think that folks paying for legal services have any interest in paying more than they need to for the sake of the profession's future.)

I work in client services in corporate law and this is not actually how clients think, at least not institutional clients who hire firms for ongoing representation. The clients I work with care a lot about lawyer development because it directly impacts every aspect of their representation, from how much it costs today to how efficient it will be next year to what happens if the relationship partner has a heart attack or retires.

If you are hiring a lawyer for a relatively short term and discrete legal problem, you probably don't care about how your work provides training opportunities for younger lawyers. But if you are a company keeping a firm on retainer or who has legal issues that take years to resolve or are simply ongoing (major litigation, regulatory matters, executing a 10 year growth plan, tax consultation, etc.) developing younger lawyers who understand your business and your legal situation, and with whom you have a relationship and established trust, is essential to ensuring continuity of service. Training younger lawyers can also help clients save money -- if you can train up a smart, reliable junior partner or a senior associate on the nuances of a matter, you can shift more of your billables onto cheaper lawyers and just pull in the big (expensive) gun when necessary.

Clients *do* want firms utilizing AI to help make legal services cheaper and more efficient. But it's not about eliminating younger attorneys. It's usually about cutting down on the time it takes to draft documents by using AI overseen by attorneys, or utilizing the planning and predictive nature of AI to help lawyers anticipate problems or provide more comprehensive and better advice without having to spend more money.

In litigation, AI will probably replace doc review. But doc review is not generally how young lawyers are trained -- it is mostly conducted by low level contract attorneys who will aren't even eligible for partnership. It's often overseen by associates on partnership track, but the AI doc review will have to overseen by a human attorney too, so that won't really change.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What you are saying here is you're not on GitHub, Substack, LinkedIn, or any of the places where people talk about the specific things they're building. You don't go to meetups where people demo their tools. Your version of curiosity is "posting here and demanding people tell you."

This comment exemplifies the problem. The prediction engine works very well in coding and other predictable disciplines. But tech bros are too far out ahead of their skis in so many areas they really don’t understand the lack of utility.

That’s ok. Let’s see where this all leads.

You clearly don't know anyone in tech.... its not replacing people and needs a lot of human help.

I am the poster you responded to. I think you over read my comment to mean AI coding tools were infallible. Even for that work, it’s a mixed bag that needs a lot of human help. I don’t work directly in tech any longer, but I did write a ruby compiler in graduate school if that’s good enough.

And domain specific training is subject to whatever the group is that’s doing the training. That too has an outsized impact on how useable the tool is right now.

Trust but verify. It’s a force multiplier and if you understand what it can do it dramatically speeds up tasks you probably don’t want to do. But I don’t see it replacing people entirely anytime soon. I do see it decimating younger worker training, but we were already on a path of shit there during and after the pandemic anyways