Hacker News Reader

Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

Almost anyone who works from home is legitimately on the way to replacement because almost all of it can now be done by bots. They excluded themselves from the "human" part of it, and now it became critical.

View on HN

That logic doesn't really make sense. If the bot can do your job then it doesn't matter if you're in the office or not. If anything, there is greater incentive to remove the in-office folks since offices are expensive.

Then we're cooked, I guess, my entire department is remote, as is most of the rest of our 5000 employees. Even before covid it was relatively common to have remote employees, but now it's more common than employees in offices.

The human part of it doesn't always mean physical presence. It means bringing creativity, judgement, ethics, collaboration, etc etc. All this can be done remotely of course.

What fundamental principles would allow replacing remote workers, that wouldn't also allow replacing office workers?

Bots can't stroke egos like office workers I guess

I've often wondered if the popularity of LLM's is that by default they will stroke the ego of the user and not argue with them when they ask for stupid things.

Lots of people go into the office and do everything on the laptop, including meetings. Useless.

I think this sums up the management-owner fantasy/middle-management fear:

Once they can tell the computer/slave what to do, what'll they need us for?

My advice is to relax: If there's no work, whatever companies remain better paying so much taxes that everybody can live like their council/town mayor/president, or the humans will be literally eating the rich.

Just try to love where you live and be good friends with your neighbours when it happens, and don't be one of the last people working/defending work.

In any event, I suspect AI could be still a long way off of that, despite the fact quite suddenly a lot more human beings can tell a computer what to do. You might feel differently, but I promise your job isn't representative of "most" people who work from home: You have no idea what the demographics of at-home workers are.

people are so funny, they think managers will use ai to replace employees. employees will replace the managers with ai.

i love that. Why code for a boss? What do you think they're going to do with the result that you can't do?

especially now

exactly. i foresee a humongous rise in smaller business, without the corporate bureaucracy, without the pointless PM's and managers and all that bs. fuck the c class, we're going to be building things ourselves.

Have you had AI manage anything? They have a terrible long-term planning ability. They appear to be able to plan ahead, but once tested they only fight fires and sit idle when everything is okay.

Even if LLMs could be capable managers, today out-of-the-box, they’re not.

oh they won't be using ai for managing anything. people will be building their own businesses, without the pointless bureaucracy and management.

But what if they want to scale

> Have you had AI manage anything? They have a terrible long-term planning ability. Even if LLMs could be capable managers, today out-of-the-box, they’re not.

This is pretty much the case for just about all jobs. AI, right now, sucks. I don't think there's any field or job title where AI has replaced all the human workers. The place I see it most in the wild are those useless AI chatbots on websites, and even there humans are still working in those positions (usually past the initial AI filter). AI is not fit to replace actual workers because it isn't "intelligent" enough to handle even the most basic and remedial jobs literal children perform. That's why there are still humans taking drive-thru orders, even after companies with billions of dollars to spend have tried to use AI to get rid of them all.

That could always change though, and by the time AI can understand "I want a #1 and a coke" well enough to replace all drive-thru order takers, AI good enough to replace a lot of mangers won't be very far behind. Depending on the quality of the manager anyway... I've had some managers who were good enough that I doubt AI will ever be good enough to do better, but I've also had managers who were so bad they probably could have already been effectively replaced by a complicated enough spreadsheet.

> Even if LLMs could be capable managers, today out-of-the-box, they’re not.

Out-of-the-box I think most humans are bad at nearly everything.

> Have you had AI manage anything?

I had perl scripts manage everything: The idea of software running a company is not even slightly far-fetched. What's new is if you actually know how the business works, you can absolutely tell a computer how to do it.

And that is important, because it means if you are struggling to get the AI to manage anything, I have to tell you that is a strong signal do not know what a manager does or should do.

The fact that my job happens on a computer, and thus can be done in the office or from home with a VPN connection back to the office, says absolutely nothing about the capability of automating my role out of existence. Unless of course you're unskilled middle management and your whole position is just talking to people, in which case yeah I could see you being on the chopping block.

Shrug. Maybe. Not everyone requires constant social validation. Likewise, not everyone needs to be incessantly bothered by others. I get that bosses feel threatened, but that is no reason to panic.

Nope.

Remote work, at an employer that embraces their employees, has resulted in excellent results instead of meandering around the office trying to bs your way through office politics.

Remote work highlights merit and office work highlights time and social integration. Both can get promotions, and I've of gotten promotions from both, but I think the former is healthier

Right now, companies prioritize profit above all else. One would hope that we could legislate a mechanism to reward companies by number of employees employed. A billion-dollar one-man company isn’t very useful to anyone. A struggling 100,000 headcount company props up a huge section of the economy. One might envision tax increases and then tax breaks based on non-contractor headcount.

I hope you are joking

Tell that to the customers who paid one billion dollars for the products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com