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Jim Kavanaugh, CEO of World Wide Technology, told CNBC that people are “too smart” to accept artificial intelligence won’t alter their work environment.
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Business leaders shouldn’t “BS” employees about the impact of AI on jobs, Kavanaugh said, adding that they should be as transparent and honest as possible.
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Kavanaugh, who has a net worth of $7 billion, stressed that overall he’s an optimist when it comes to AI and its ability to improve productivity.
Spoken like a true techbrodude that.
Change isn’t bad, absolutely. As long as you view people as statistics, not as human beings.
But when you’ve had the job that kept you and your family fed and comfortably housed for decades suddenly vanish on you, that’s a change that’s bad. When that change guts your finances so you have to move your family into a shithole tenement that squeezes you for rent while your food turns into cheap, mass-processed, nutritionally dubious pap.
This is doubly so if it happens on the tail end of your life so you’re not realistically able to be retrained and re-employed.
But those are just statistics. Just numbers that flow on a screen. While in reality there’s human misery you carefully look away from so that you can point to comforting numbers.
But here’s a question for you: if things are always better off after a change, why are the people who cheerlead for such change so super-against any attempts to mitigate the impacts with a small sliver of their benefits!?
You don’t just learn, get a job, and be set forever. That’s not the real world. It’s not supposed to be the real world. You develop yourself, apply that development to getting a job, then keep learning and keep developing yourself to be ready for the next opportunity.
The real world isn’t stable, and companies fail with or without technological advances. All your anecdotes are just that, and things that are happening every day with or without progress.
Less people will be starving in 2-3 years with every meaningful advance in tech. Progress makes the world a better place at every level of the ladder. The Luddites were terrible people actively working to make the world a worse place, to try to maintain their own monopoly. But a hell of a lot more people had access to warm clothes when their insane nonsense got put down and clothes became easy to mass produce.
Again, that isn’t LLMs because LLMs have functionally zero value. But even the poorest of the poor are better off when technology changes industry, and yes, new skilled jobs have always come back quickly.
It’s easy to hide behind simple statistics and I’m with you in the beginningAI can help increase efficiency to bring overall more people out of survival poverty. That’s excellent.
However, we’ve seen in the US at least, that the last decade or two of economic progress has been marked by an increase in service level jobs. Looking just slightly deeper shows us a decrease in solid middle class jobs, a decrease in typical income, a huge portion of people are worse off even if some overall stats are better. Then what happens if ai replaces driving and warehouse people and fast food? What’s left?
The last decade has been those “middle class” jobs moving to China/India and providing way more of them with jobs that pull them from starving to not starving.
You can debate policy stuff of offshoring and whatever, but globalization isn’t removing jobs. It’s moving them. It’s completely separate from technology making labor more efficient.
Tell me, how does sociopathy actually feel?
How does if feel ignoring the billions of future people you’re actively trying to fuck over by preventing progress that makes their life better, because you think helping people today by making their lives better is a bad thing?
Continuous learning is part of your responsibility as a human. Your one example of someone losing their job would be fine if there weren’t also thousands of other people starving who get better access to food by the same progress. Statistics are people. They’re just the people you’re ignoring to make the world a worse place.
That’s how sociopathy feels? Weird.